“Senior Citizens Witness Portent”
By Daily Bruin Staff
Sept. 27, 1998 9:00 p.m.
Monday, September 28, 1998
"Senior Citizens Witness Portent"
by Rhoda Janzen
"Senior Citizens Witness Portent"
By Rhoda Janzen
I was driving with my friend the optimist
who despite her optimism had that afternoon
noticed at Ralph’s that on her shopping list
she had scribbled ground belief, and the moon,
star-like, airkissed the Hollywood jacaranda.
The unhappy geriatrics withheld applause,
sitting on what they wished was a veranda,
not the bald cement abutment that it was.
They were motionless after a matzo supper,
watching as on a stage a curse-hungry teen,
whose face was tossed like a crumpled wrapper
into our headlights and our panic of adrenaline:
he seized a bicycle and sheered it at our car.
It was one of L.A.’s casual cruelties, the faces
as from a hole punch, dispensable and sure,
the earth that roils with unnamed psychosis
just under the urban blanket we have tucked
around its bulk, the fault-finding and the path
seismic – oh, it’s been coming, it’s been sicked
on us, the six-toed nightblooming behemoth.
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